Network Neutrality Slipped in the Back Door

Abandoning all pretenses of responsible journalism, I am taking this blog post with no links or sourcing as an explanation of what happened with net neutrality and AT&T. Quickly: net neutrality for two years was a concession allowing a telecom merger. This prevents AT&T from either setting up a protection racket to extract funds from content providers or building additional premium services for those providers. Well, they can add more specifically for Google or Amazon, they just cannot charge more for it. Well, they can charge you more for it, just not the content providers. Also, it does not apply to wireless or video services.

We will see what happens in two years. Re-re-regulating something before it sunsets seems easy enough, so I do not know whether we should expect AT&T to be acting as if net neutrality were permanent or going away in two years. Unless you have a lobbyist of your own, you can wait to see which company’s lobbyists win the next round; AT&T is probably the favorite in that fight. Franchise reform is going better than I had hoped, so it may be moot in two years, but that is currently for cable TV not cable modems. The earlier post seems to think the problem will move in the other direction, with our series of tubes becoming too clogged for e-mail to get through.